Digitized at Georgetown University Law Library

xxv, 294 pages ; 25 cm

Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook's obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it's time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they're sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters. The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation - the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power - needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation. The purpose of technology - and of the corporations that make it - is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It's time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent. -- From publisher description

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-281) and index

Introduction : After the revolution -- Part I. Disruptions : Consent and sovereignty : Corporate superpowers ; Legitimacy -- Rise of the digital commons : The technical commons ; Activism ; Balance of power -- Part II. Control 2.0 : Networked authoritarianism : How China's censorship works ; Authoritarian deliberation ; Western fantasies versus reality -- Variants and permutations : "Constitutional" technology ; Corporate collaboration ; Divide and conquer ; Digital Bonapartism -- Part III. Democracy's challenges : Eroding accountability : Surveillance ; WikiLeaks and the fate of controversial speech -- Democratic censorship : Intentions versus consequences ; Saving the children -- Copywars : Shunning due process ; Aiding authoritarianism ; Lobbynomics -- Part IV. Sovereigns of cyberspace : Corporate censorship : New neutrality ; Mobile complications ; Big brother Apple -- Do no evil : Chinese lessons ; Flickr fail ; Buzz bust ; Privacy and Facebook -- Facebookistan and Googledom : Double edge ; Inside the leviathan ; Google governance ; Implications -- Part V. What is to be done? : Trust, but verify : The regulation problem ; Shared value ; The global network imitative ; Lessons from other industries -- In search of "Internet freedom" policy : Washington squabbles ; Goals and methods ; Democratic discord ; Civil society pushes back -- Global Internet governance : The United Nations ; ICANN, can you? -- Building a netizen-centric Internet : Strengthening the netizen commons ; Expanding the technical commons ; Utopianism versus reality ; Getting political ; Corporate transparency and netizen engagement ; Personal responsibility

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